


paper boats

by emmram



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Episode Tag, Gen, spoilers for 2.03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-23
Updated: 2015-01-23
Packaged: 2018-03-08 17:05:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3216860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emmram/pseuds/emmram
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Her father has taught her better than to be thankful for what is her right by birth, and even when he forgets, that truth is pressed and branded onto her heart and her dark skin and her nimble fingers tracing the arcs and flourishes of a language she knows like a mother’s lullaby."</p><p>A series of snippets from Samara's pov through the events of 2.03: The Good Traitor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	paper boats

**Author's Note:**

> SPOILERS for 2.03. A couple of vague historical references pulled entirely from a quick skim of the Wikipedia page re: history of Arab presence in Europe. Plus, the show really plays fast and loose with its timeline, so I’ve avoided making any direct references. Please feel free to point out and/or correct any mistakes you find.
> 
> Title is an oblique reference to a poem by Rabindranath Tagore.

When her father tells her it is time to leave, Samara is not surprised. Indeed, she has been preparing for this for what seems like over a hundred years, shutting her heart to the world she has grown up in, reaching, instead, to the stories she listened to as a child, the wonderful things she could’ve been and the wonderful things she can still be. Her father, who counts his scars like trophies and his trophies like sacrifices, is drawn and saddened, stretched thin by fear and betrayal. She mourns their old life for him, for all the Moors who have sacrificed their selves and their souls for a country that still sees fit to throw them aside like so much rotten fruit.

Inside she is selfish. She is happy. She is _free_.

She carries with her the few Arabic texts she has been able to salvage from fire and rot and the sharp beady eyes of loose-tongued neighbours. Some would call her lucky to have been able to achieve as much she has; lucky that her father was one of the last few Moors who still found favour at court. But her father has taught her better than to be thankful for what is her right by birth, and even when he forgets, that truth is pressed and branded onto her heart and her dark skin and her nimble fingers tracing the arcs and flourishes of a language she knows like a mother’s lullaby.

* * *

 

They slip into Paris with a hope that tastes sharp and bitter at the back of Samara’s tongue.

Her father, who knows the language of war far better than French or Spanish, wishes to seek asylum as a French soldier by selling one of Spain’s most prized weapons. She reminds him that it will be days, still, before they can obtain a private audience with the King and that they still need to eat and sleep in the meanwhile. He leaves her at the marketplace with some reluctance, then presses her favourite book of poetry in her hands.

“This is all we are, and all we’ll ever be,” he tells her.

The book is heavy. She understands.

* * *

 

Balthasar is smaller than she remembers.

He is shrivelled and twisted with hate; it seeps from him like a kind of miasma. She is not surprised; it’s a sickness, and she only pities him. She is far less so towards the French soldiers who managed to ruin her family’s only chance at freedom, and is caught somewhere between pity and rage for the one who’s managed to get himself captured along with her.

Porthos is so like her father that her heart aches. He wears his pain like a badge of honour, so sure of his place in the world as long as he still possesses his head and his heart and his hands and an enemy to kill. She has seen how that belief has broken her father, and knows, with sudden and sharp conviction, that there will be no one like her to prop him up when Porthos is inevitably broken, too.

 _Go to where you come from_ , she tells him, echoing the words that’ve been slung at her with varying degress of vitriol over the years. There is a kernel of truth even in blind hatred.

Porthos doesn’t answer, only reaches again for the arrow embedded in his leg.

She runs her hand over the words that’ve given her so much comfort and hope, and thinks, _this is all I’ll ever be, and I’m proud_.

“Would you like to hear some poetry?” she asks.

* * *

 

Half of her heritage disappears in a terrible storm of fire, noise, and powdered stone.

Samara screams—

* * *

 

She walks the streets to the garrison, her cloak pulled tightly around her. It is still finely dusted with the last moments of her father’s life, and she imagines that she can still carry him home, at least this way.

She stops briefly at the entrance, spots Porthos limping across the courtyard. He is proud and happy and calls his fellow soldiers _home_ , and it startles her for a moment. _Home_ was her father; she is far more used to bitter frost and layered skirts and hardy food and guttural European tongues than she is to the climes and the culture of the country she wishes to reclaim as her— _their_ —true home. A terrible craven part of her believes in Porthos’ buoyant smile and the absurd hope that she might still have a place in her adopted country as an equal, but she dismisses the thought before it is even fully formed.

His brothers are his idols, she thinks. It’s always a bad idea to worship an image; to lay your heart bare at the feet of something so flawed.

She looks at his brilliant smile, and loses the heart to say any of this.

“Goodbye brother,” she says instead, kisses his cheek, and turns homeward.


End file.
